Deleting my Duolingo account and seeking alternatives
After a 550 day streak I'm fed up with this app, and have requested my account be deleted.
Duolingo is the market-leader in language learning apps. It has great brand awareness, for example showing up unmistakably at the end of the Barbie movie, and makes satisfying ping sounds when you get things right, making great use of classical conditioning to get users to stick to their programs.
So why am I leaving?
Duolingo primarily teaches by repetition and exposure. Back in 2017 when I studied their Japanese course there was a little unit summary
section where it would briefly explain the grammar that a given unit would teach. It wasn't brilliant back then, but it would at least try to explain how the language worked.
Since 2022 I've been studying the Hungarian course, which doesn't have any of that. A brief look at the 2024 Japanese course suggests it's been removed there too. Instead, you're expected to pick up the grammar purely through exposure in the given sentences. This can be a good teaching method: you can learn faster with a test - teach - test[1] structure than with a pure teaching approach. But in Duolingo's case, the teaching step is totally missing.
Duolingo's drills have you translate things both from Hungarian to English and English to Hungarian, and then the auto-marked tells you if you were right or not. Sentences you get wrong go into a mistakes
pile, and come up again so you can get them right. Duolingo doesn't tell you what the mistakes are or why your attempt is wrong, it just tells you what it wanted instead.
I had already spotted that the Hungarian to English translations wanted very specific wording in the translation, and when I provided exactly equivalent translations it would tell me I was wrong. So I was suspicious that it was required the same amount of false precision in my Hungarian. But how am I supposed to tell, when I (by definition) don't speak Hungarian well?
Luckily, I have access to a native Hungarian speaker who I can ask! She tells me that yes, Duolingo is requiring a lot of very specific word choices and sentence structure that does not matter, and so I'm over-learning specific constructs that are Duolingo friendly
.
From the classical conditioning hint above you might have inferred that Duolingo is heavily gamified. The pings are the most obvious example, but Duolingo's whole service is designed to be gamified, in a way that I think conflicts with their core mission of language learning - I might go so far as to make the claim that their core mission is no longer language learning, but instead to be a mobile game app with language learning as a general theme[2].
Duolingo has two main game loops: the unit track and the tournaments. Both of these have flaws that mean they don't work to encourage actual language learning.
This is the more straightforward of the two. The main screen of Duolingo gives you access to a series of hierarchical lessons, the smallest of which takes about 3 minutes to complete. As you complete the lessons, a little circle fills up and then turns gold, and the circles are arranged into units, which are themselves arranged into large sections.
The main motivation here is making progress
, watching the circles fill up and getting visually further through the track. But does this progress reflect actual language learning?
Twice while I've been on this course, the unit track has been changed to either reorganise or expand
the content. I quote expand
because this change doesn't seem to add more content, it just spreads the existing content thinner, with fewer new words and more repetition. The reorganisations have only served to move particular words and concept before or ahead of my current point in the track, meaning I either miss them or they're not correctly flagged as new words when I hit them.
Some of these problems could be fixed by making the unit more fixed, or giving the user a choice of which order to do them and not moving words between them, or giving the users more control about when to advance and get new words, or when to do more practice with what they've already got.
The tournament loop wants players to compete to earn experience points to win against each other in weekly-ish tournaments, moving up as they win a lot or moving down if they only earn a low amount.
So how do players earn experience? One way is by taking lessons from the unit track. If this was all there was, then that would maybe be fine - just some extra incentive to take more lessons, right?
But there are also timed lessons
, which show up with a quick link from the tournament screen. These lessons are quick, and reward large amounts of experience. They do not introduce new words, and come in two forms: one of which is word matching and one of which is a quick regular lessons.
Unfortunately, these timed lessons are the best way to earn experience. So if you're motivated to win the tournaments, then you might do a lot of these timed lessons, which means you're not learning any new words.
As a further problem with experience, the daily quests section[3] also provides experience point boosts, and often the fastest way to complete the daily quests is to do timed lessons, or to do the easy matching game in practice hub
. This means that for maximum experience point gain your route might look like starting in practice hub and then bouncing other to the timed lessons, completely skipping the unit track that is supposed to teach you new words!
BadAesthetics
Bad
is obviously subjective here, but I'm ashamed to say that it's Duolingo's aesthetics that finally overcame inertia and conditioning and made me decide to leave the platform.
I'm not going to go into great detail, but here are 3 examples where Duolingo's style seems to say it's not for me, it's actually for the phone-addicted, tik-tok generation[4].
angry owlwidget. Please just give me a simple
have I done it yetreadout, don't mock-threaten me.
you're GOATedrather than just telling you it was a perfect lesson, which... just no.
lesson completescreen is only there briefly. But the app icon occasionally changes to something uglier and more eye-catching than the standard one.
All in all, this means I don't like looking at the widget, I don't like completing lessons, and I don't like looking at the app icon: so why keep it around? Coupled with the gamification/conditioning and the bad teaching, that's enough for me to delete it.
What am I doing instead of Duolingo? I'm not giving up learning Hungarian by a long shot, just dropping one pointless and frustrating app. Instead I'm using the following tools and services:
Hopefully these will be better language learning tools than Duolingo - I've been using them already to make up for Duo's deficiencies, but will be relying more fully on them now that I've ditched the owl.